Recently I came into an event at the Los Angeles Poker Classic determined to start out slow and easy... "take the temperature of the table," as I described it to myself. Yeah, that was my plan, but I'm such a pumpkin that within fifteen minutes I had drained away half my stack on a bunch of reckless adventures and hazardous bluffs. That's what happens when you take the temperature of the table using a rectal thermometer shoved up your own butt.
Desperate times calling for desperate measures, I immediately made a deal with God. "God," I said, "if you get me out of this mess I've made, I promise I'll stop playing stupid."
To which God responded, "Geez, JV, don't make promises you can't possibly keep."
Nevertheless, big luck came to my rescue a few hands later when I got my money in against pocket aces with Ka-Ja and caught runnerrunner hearts to get back into the game.
Making the most of my second chance, I settled down to some strong, solid, thoughtful and attentive poker. For the next eleven hours, I played my aforementioned butt off, and though I never accumulated many chips, I also never got my money in with the worst of it. Guess I managed to stop playing stupid after all.
I busted out in 18th place, when my K-Q got run down by... ironically enough... [Kh]-[Jh]. I would like to have finished higher, of course, but I can't be too upset about being knocked out of the tournament by the very hand that had kept me in it half a day prior.
But I've been thinking about this luck business, and I've come to the conclusion that it's better to get your chips in after you've gotten the luck than before. Self-evident, right? Yet I'm shocked at how many tournament players willingly shove their stacks in with something like 7-7, hoping to get called by A-K, and then to end up on the right side of the coin flip. Isn't it better to get your money in with a 3-1 or 4-1 advantage? To that end, consider the Big Luck approach to tournament poker.
Basically, this strategy calls for being liberal with your limps when chips are cheap, hoping to flop huge and ride the implied odds to a large pot. Naturally, you can take this approach with middle pocket pairs looking to flop a set, but you can also use it with middle suited connectors, or suited aces or suited kings... anything that can score big with an improbably lucky flop. Or say five limpers bring it back to you in the small blind. Call with anything. You're getting the right time to try to score some big luck.
Most of the time, of course, you won't get the big luck, and then you have to be able to get away from your hand (or you'll donk off your chips like I did.) But every now and then, you'll come upon a situation where the price of a call is low enough - effectively zero in terms of the overall tournament situation - that you can take a stab at getting very lucky before you have to put very much of anything in the pot.
